Creation

Who cares what the Bible says? That is the Word of Man.Here is a little song:

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From desert cliff and mountaintop we trace the wide design,
Strike-slip fault and overthrust and syn and anticline. . .
We gaze upon creation where erosion makes it known,
And count the countless aeons in the banding of the stone.
Odd, long-vanished creatures and their tracks & shells are found;
Where truth has left its sketches on the slate below the ground.
The patient stone can speak, if we but listen when it talks.
Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the rocks.

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There are those who name the stars, who watch the sky by night,
Seeking out the darkest place, to better see the light.
Long ago, when torture broke the remnant of his will,
Galileo recanted, but the Earth is moving still.
High above the mountaintops, where only distance bars,
The truth has left its footprints in the dust between the stars.
We may watch and study or may shudder and deny,
Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the sky.

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By stem and root and branch we trace, by feather, fang and fur,
How the living things that are descend from things that were.
The moss, the kelp, the zebrafish, the very mice and flies,
These tiny, humble, wordless things---how shall they tell us lies?
We are kin to beasts; no other answer can we bring.
The truth has left its fingerprints on every living thing.
Remember, should you have to choose between them in the strife,
Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote life.

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And we who listen to the stars, or walk the dusty grade,
Or break the very atoms down to see how they are made,
Or study cells, or living things, seek truth with open hand.
The profoundest act of worship is to try to understand.
Deep in flower and in flesh, in star and soil and seed,
The truth has left its living word for anyone to read.
So turn and look where best you think the story is unfurled.
Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the world.

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Turn and look. Are you a creationist? Then tell me Who Created the Universe.Do you want to tell me that the Bible tells us something different from what is plainly evident? Based on what?What the universe says about what God has wrought is indisputable. Do you then wish to dispute it?

Congratulations for trying to do apologetics right. As I was taught (Creationist and Fundamentalist Apologetics, Creation/Evolution Journal, Vol.4, No.4, Fall 1984, pp 19—31), properly applied apologetics is an attempt to harmonize doctrine with the real world:

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The Apologetical Task

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Francis A. Schaeffer, surely one of the most prolific and influential writers on, the contemporary fundamentalist scene, explains the nature and purpose of apologetics:

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"There are two purposes of Christian apologetics. The first is defense. The second is to communicate Christianity in a way that any given generation can understand. . . . It is unreasonable to expect people of the next generation in any age to continue [to believe] in the historic Christian position, unless they are helped to see where arguments . . . brought against Christianity . . . by their generation are fallacious." (The God Who Is There, p. 139)

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In other words, the apologist for the faith must seek to soothe the doubts plaguing the faithful and to remove the roadblocks in the path of unbelievers who might otherwise come to faith. The apologist tries to defend the faith by showing that it is reasonable; one need not kiss one's mind goodbye in order to convert.

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Unfortunately, what we commonly see as "apologetics" is the creationist approach of denying the contradictory evidence. Denying that that evidence does not exist is not the way to harmonization. Rather, the evidence must be recognized and properly addressed. I see you trying to do that.At the same time, ... .Does the science have to be harmonized to your own particular fallible human interpretations of Scripture? Or does your own particular fallible human interpretation of Scripture need to be harmonized to the real world?Is your own fallible human misunderstanding of Scripture the Touchstone? Or could you possibly be wrong such that your own misunderstanding has to be harmonized with reality?

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BTW, if you want to know how to do all those things in your messages, it's through dBCodes, though this forum also accepts HTML -- if you Peek on this message, you will see that I used the HTML HR tag to create that dividing line that only went across 80% of the window and was centered. In the lower right-hand corner of each post is a Peek button. If you click on it, a new page will open up displaying the message with all the embedded codes revealed. You see something you'd like to do yourself, just click on the Peek button and it shall be revealed unto you.There's also on this forum a kind of tutorial/reference page of dBCodes, but I copied it to a text file long ago so I've forgotten how to find it again. Still, there are some codes like qs for a boxed quote or quote for what I did, that you will end up using all the time.And as you're trying to do your fancy formatting, you can use the Preview button below to see whether it even worked. It's a good idea to use the preview button until you are satisfied with your message before you hit the Submit Reply button. Of course, you can always go back to edit your own messages, but that can start to get messy; also, you should always state the reason for the edit as a common courtesy -- ABE means "Added By Edit", not Scotland's standard choice of the world soccer championship winner, "Anybody But England!" (one or two World Championships ago, "ABE" was a very popular t-shirt in Scotland.

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Touchstone.Here is the Wikipedia article on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchstone_(assaying_tool)Basically, it's a stone that if you rub a soft metal against it it will leave a mark. And the color of that mark will tell you how pure that soft metal is.Of course, the soft metal in question is gold, so this was an assaying method going back into antiquity.

I already explained it creation 11 days ago (Message 810 of Age Correlations and An Old Earth, Version 2 No 1), but he refuses to learn anything: So then you are correct that the year has not changed from 360 days to 365 days. Though it has changed from 400 days to 365.2425 days over a period of about 400 million years. Let me correct that to make it clear: "The length of the year measured in the number of days in the year depends on the rate of the earth's rotation."The actual length of the year (31,556,925.216 seconds in the tropical year) does not change, but rather it is the changing length of the day that causes there to be a different number of days in the year.To see the effect of the slowing of the earth's rotation over historical time, let's take that rate of 2ms/day/century back 10,000 years into pre-history. 10,000 years is 100 centuries, so the length of a day 10,000 years ago would have been only a fifth of a second (200ms = 0.2 sec) shorter. That would translate to the length of the year having been 365.2433 days 10,000 years ago. Practically no difference.To reiterate: The number of days in a year has never ever been 360, but rather that will happen some time in the future when the length of the day is 87658.13 seconds. Since that is 1258.13 seconds longer, dividing by the rate of 2ms/day/century yields 629,065 centuries = 62,906,500 years. So we will have to wait about 63 million years into the future before the year will be 360 days long.Refer to my page on the false creationist "leap second" claim created (and apparently abandoned) by Walter Brown: DWISE1'S CREATION / EVOLUTION PAGE: Earth's Rotation is Slowing.Edited by dwise1, : Removed embedded newline from my page's titleEdited by dwise1, : Corrected the length of the tropical year in seconds, which was off by 0.76 seconds. Sorry about that.

I discuss a lot of that on my page about Walter Brown's leap-second claim: DWISE1'S CREATION / EVOLUTION PAGE: Earth's Rotation is Slowing.Basically, leading up to 1900 astronomers suspected that the earth's rotation was not constant so they made many precise observations and by 1920 had confirmed their suspicion. Since seconds were defined as a division of a day, if the length of a day was changing then so would the length of a second. Since so many formulae in physics and astronomy depend on the length of a second being constant, they had a major problem on their hands.To make a long story short, astronomers used those precise observations to arrive at the length of a second as 1/86400-th of a day in 1900 (though defined as a fraction of the tropical year for 1900 January 0 at 12 hours ephemeris time) and thus established the "ephemeris second" in 1956. Around that time, physicists were working on atomic clocks, which they calibrated using the ephemeris second, ending up with the "atomic second" which is virtually identical to the ephemeris second in length. In 1967 the atomic second was adopted as the international standard second (SI second), which was adopted for the new Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) which replaced GMT.While administering UTC, the "Time Lords" (International Bureau of Time (BIH), US Naval Observatory (USNO), and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)) tried different schemes to keep UTC in sync with noon of the mean solar day. They finally settled on adding a "leap second" to UTC when necessary, which ended up being about every 18 months since by that time each day was about 2 ms longer than the standard day from 1900.Leap seconds is something that I worked with professionally for about 20 years, since it is an integral part of GPS and we worked with GPS receivers. In 1979, Walter Brown published his false claim based on his misunderstanding of what leap seconds are, resulting in him assuming a rate of deceleration of the earth's rotation hundreds of times to great. That claim was refuted within a few years, but creationists continue to use it even when its falsehood is explained to them (which elevates them from being just plain wrong to being deliberate liars). First, I may have grabbed the wrong figure. The ephemeris second is defined as the fraction 1/31,556,925.9747 of the tropical year for 1900 January 0 at 12 hours ephemeris time. Wikipedia defines the current mean tropical year as 365.24219 days of 86400 SI seconds, which is 31,556,925.216 SI seconds. That differs from my statement by 0.759 SI seconds. Not off by much, but I will go back and correct my message. In the classic two-body problem, I guess it would be. However, there are external forces at work which change the eccentricity of the earth's orbit, but to my knowledge they would not change its period, so AFAIK the period of the earth's orbit should remain constant. If we have an astronomer or astrophysicist on staff then he/she should chime in on this.There's another factor, which is that the sun's mass is diminishing at a rate of 4 to 5 million tonnes per second, which would cause the sun's gravity to diminish proportionally and the size of the earth's orbit to increase which should affect the period of the orbit, increasing it I would think. However, the mass lost over the past 4.5 billion (10⁹) years the total mass lost was just a few hundredths of one percent of the sun's total mass, so its gravity has diminished by just a few hundredths of one percent, which has resulted in the earth's orbital radius increasing by less than 100,000 miles (my own estimates place that figure at about 66,000 miles). All that said, within the human timescale that should make the earth's orbital period a constant value for all practical purposes. I don't see how you arrive at that. Just exactly what would the earth be rubbing against in its orbit around the sun to cause such friction? Also, according to orbital mechanics if the earth were to be slowing down in its orbit it would drop to ever lower orbits, sending it spiraling into the sun. That has not happened, last I've heard.Tidal forces and other factors cause the earth's rotation to increase or decrease, with decreasing being dominant (eg, tidal forces which accelerate the moon in its orbit). That has an effect on how long it takes for the earth to make one rotation on its axis, but not on how long it takes the earth to make one revolution around the sun.Stating the length of a year in days which are changing only makes it appear the period of the earth's orbit is changing. That is just an illusion. Measure the length of the year in units that are constant, such as SI seconds which are based on cesium-131, and you should see no change in the length of the year ... outside of miniscule changes due to solar mass loss and perturbations which have nothing to do with the earth's rate of rotation.BTW, we constantly monitor and measure the earth's rotation -- the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS). This warrants further discussion.Actually, the earth's velocity around the sun is changing all the time, first decreasing for half a year and then increasing the other half. Every actual solar day (ie, noon to noon with "noon" being when the sun is on the meridian as measured by the sundial or the solar observatory) is of different length one day after the other.That is because of the dynamics (or the kinematics?) of the earth's elliptical orbit as described in Kepler's Second Law of Planetary Motion in which the orbiting body sweeps out equal areas in equal times. When the earth is closer to the sun, its orbital velocity is greater and it moves farther along its orbit. When the earth is farther away from the sun, its orbital velocity is less and it doesn't move as far.How does that affect the length of the solar day? The earth completes one rotation in one sidereal day, but it has also moved about one degree along its orbit so it must continue to rotate by that much in order for the sun to again cross the meridian -- on average, a sidereal day is about four minutes shorter than a solar day (if you divide 360° by 24 hours, that comes to four minutes of time per one degree of rotation). However, since the distance the earth travels along its orbit changes day after day depending on how far the earth is from the sun (which is constantly changing in an elliptical orbit), then that changes the angle traversed which in turn changes how much longer the earth needs to rotate to finally hit solar noon.This daily variation of the solar day is well known and well studied and gives us the equation of time, a graph that you will find on the higher quality sundials. This variation also leads to the definition of the mean solar day -- at the top of that page is a graphic showing the difference between sidereal and solar days that I described above.Again, I discuss all this on my page, DWISE1'S CREATION / EVOLUTION PAGE: Earth's Rotation is Slowing.

Any varving that reflects the daily, seasonal, and annual development of those layers. As explained by ringo in Message 1083 as well as the Devonian coral I described to you in Message 810 of Age Correlations and An Old Earth, Version 2 No 1: No, that is utter nonsense.However, such activity which vertically redistributes the earth's mass does have an effect on the slowing down and speeding up of the earth's rotation due to Conservation of Angular Momentum. Mountain building would increase the earth's moment of inertia (the multiple integral of mass times the square of the distance from axis of rotation, so the algebraic formula for calculating the moment of inertia is highly different for different shapes and their relationship to the axis of rotation), which would slow down the earth's rotation. The ongoing rebound of the North American continent from the removal of the weight of the ice cap during the last ice age similarly slows down the earth's rotation. The thrusting up of a portion of the earth's crust due to an earthquake would also slow down the earth's rotation. However, when a portion of the earth's crust drops during an earthquake, that would decrease the earth's moment of inertia which would therefore speed up the earth's rotation.

Could you please be more specific about what that "good point" was? Here are the choices:

1. ringo writes:

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   We have no reason to think that that is true.
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2. ringo writes:

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   The length of the year depends on the rate of the earth's rotation.
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3. ringo writes:

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   If the length of a year changed from 360 days to 365 days, there would have to have been some major force to change the rate of rotation.
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4. ringo writes:

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   That force would have left evidence. It didn't.
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5. ringo writes:

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   So it's reasonable to conclude that the change didn't happen.
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So which "good point" are you referring to? They are all good points, though #2 and #3 could be misunderstood.#2 The way that that is worded, it could sound like changes in the earth's rotation would cause changes in how long it takes the earth to complete one solar revolution. Here is the correction I offered in Message 1078: BTW, those are SI seconds, which are constant. See my Message 1080 for a more complete explanation.#3 Unfortunately, ringo forgot to describe what that "major force to change the rate of rotation" would have had to do. His description of the event, "the length of a year changed from 360 days to 365 days", should be more than adequate for any reader whose brain is engaged, but you have repeatedly demonstrated that you are not a member of that group.360 days in a year would be the result of a slowly rotating earth, whereas 365 days in a year would be the result of a more rapidly rotating earth. Therefore, that "major force to change the rate of rotation" would have had to have sped up the earth very significantly.Since the earth is instead slowing down over time, such that the number of days in a year is decreasing not increasing, that "major force to change the rate of rotation" would not only have had to have working contrary to what is actually happening, but it would have had to have done it with impossible rapidity that would have had catastrophic effects (that would have left tons of evidence) -- as I demonstrate in Message 1078, it will take about 63 million years for the earth to slow down enough to go from 365.2524 days down to 360 days, so that is not a trivial change.#4 Id est, such a massive force working that squeezed 63 million years into an extremely short amount of time should have left massive amounts of evidence.It didn't.#5 Do please tell us that this was the "good point".

If you are asserting yet more nonsense like your "fishbowl", then you must have been smoking wombat dung again. You must realize that that stuff is really bad for your breath.If you mean what if the sun's gravity were to change, then, yes, that is what is happening as the sun loses mass due to hydrogen fusion and solar wind and flares. I already discussed that in the message to which you are responding. What part don't you understand?As the sun's mass decreases, its gravity decreases proportionally. As its gravity decreases, size of the planets' orbits increase, which causes an increase in the period of the orbit as per Kepler's Third Law of Planetary Motion.However, the proportion of the mass lost is extremely small, only a few hundreds of one percent, since the sun had entered the Main Sequence 4.5 billion (10⁹) years ago. That means that over that same time the sun's gravity has decreased by only a few hundredths of one percent (insignificant) and that the size of the earth's orbit would have increased by a similar proportion, as well as the length of the year again by a small proportion.And that is over a period of 4.5 billion years. Over the period of a few millennia the proportions would be vastly less. Would never happen without some catastrophic ejection of very massive amounts of solar mass.Hydrogen fusion produces helium and energy from the conversion of mass to energy (therefore from the loss of mass). Every second, 600 millions tons of hydrogen fuse to form 596 million tons of helium, resulting in the loss of 4 million tons as energy. You should be able to do the math: 99.3% of the hydrogen mass remains as helium and 0.7% (rounded up) is lost as energy.That gives us an upper limit to the amount of mass that the sun could ever possibly lose due to hydrogen fusion: 0.7%. To convert that to your units, if the original gravity was 100, then after every single hydrogen nucleus has been consumed by fusion, the resultant gravity would be 99.3. It could never ever possibly become 97 without a catastrophe that would wipe out the entire solar system and render this discussion, and all possible discussions, moot.More practically, you could never fuse all the hydrogen in the sun, but only what's in the core which contains half the sun's mass and is where the fusion reaction happens. Since only half the hydrogen could be involved, that would reduce the maximum loss to 0.35% of the sun's mass. However, only about 75% of the sun is hydrogen, so that reduced the maximum loss to .2625%. And even that is a stretch, since we could not possibly fuse every single hydrogen nucleus in the core.So that leaves us with a maximum possible loss of the quarter of a percent of the sun's mass, with the gravity decreasing by the same proportion, etc. That would mean that at most you would see the sun's gravity going from a 100 to 99.75. That is not much. Also, that is over the life of the sun, about 10 billion years. Effectively no effect. When the mass of the second body (earth) is significantly less than the mass of the first body (the sun), then mass of the smaller body is effectively unity and can be ignored in the calculation.

Am I supposed to be standing on one foot as I do that?STFW ("Search The Web"). You are just as capable of using Google as I am, so why should I do your work for you?

I started studying "creation science" and its claims in 1981 and my experience has been the same: I have learned so much more science by investigating creationist claims.BTW, in all that time (about 37 years now) I have yet to encountered a single true or valid creationist claim. Though I have encountered far too much creationist avoidance and outright lying.On YouTube I have found a video series which reflects our mutual experiences: Tony Reed's How Creationism Taught Me Real Science. His format in that long-running series is to first present the creationist claim as if he didn't doubt it, only to pronounce, "I had to investigate."His video about the earth's rotation is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNpspB4sWAk. He deals with the tidal rhythmite data at 4:20.Share and enjoy!

For decades, the nature of the varves of Devonian fossil coral has been presented in connection with the slowing of the earth's rotation. As a result, I know about the evidence, but I do not have links to that data immediately available -- for that matter, far too much of my research material is stored away in boxes.You know what you want to look for and you know how to perform searches online. We are all equally capable of performing such searches.